Winsteps

According to blogger TrueTalk, at Pop!Tech 2005, Norman Packard, a pioneer in chaos and complexity theory at the Santa Fe Institute, commented about "strong" and "weak" science.

Strong science: started with Galileo and the attempt to discover the Rule of Natural Law, continued through Newton and Einstein, and derives the effects of those laws mathematically. It is responsible for the discovery of planetary orbits and the design of cars, computers and bombs.

Weak science: concerned with "Unruly Natural Law." Examples are chaos, turbulence, the emergence of life itself or consciousness. The effects cannot be derived mathematically.

This suggests that Rasch measurement neatly straddles the two domains. Its theory is based on mathematically-derivable "strong" laws, but its practice relies on the stochastic resonance of "weak" laws.